Computer 1997


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Vol. 30, No. 9: SEPTEMBER 1997, pp. 37-39

Will Physical Scalability Sabotage Performance Gains?

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Doug Matzke Texas Instruments

Although reduced feature size is good news in some respects, other factors will soon influence how we wring performance from tighter integration. Wire scaling and its interaction with faster clocks will restrict the performance increases we've come to expect.

Many designers expect processor performance to keep improving at the current rate indefinitely as feature sizes shrink. However, as wire delays become a larger percentage of overall signal delay and as clock speeds grow faster than transistor speed, I believe performance increases will ultimately fall off. These delays are inevitable simply because wires are not keeping pace with the scaling of other features. In fact, for CMOS processes below 0.25 micron, the physical limits of wire scaling 1 may begin to change high-speed processor design. That is, an unacceptably small percentage of the die will be reachable during a single clock cycle.

To support my prediction, I have mapped trends in a metric that relates time and distance and projections in clock speed across eight processor generations, from 0.6 to 0.06 um. During this span (probably 0.1 um) we'll see a billion transistor processor. To illustrate how physical scalability could affect the design of processors on this scale, I also compared signal drive distance and clock speed for the span endpoints, 0.6 and 0.06 um.

WIRE DELAY TRENDS

Wires do not scale well because the spacing between them, the wire pitch, must continue to shrink so that wires can connect to smaller transistors. As processes improve, and on-chip wire cross-sections shrink, wire delays will increase per unit length of wire (resistance is inversely proportional to the cross-section of a wire). Making wires "taller" (vertically thicker) can compensate, but eventually this approach fails because capacitance between the sides of the wires and the substrate will also increase. 1 The final optimal aspect ratio is about 2 (vertical thickness/width), which means parallel wires would look like a set of long 2 × 4's resting on their narrow sides with their centers spaced by the pitch distance.

Time-distance relationships

To see why wire delays are increasing, you have to understand the relationship between a time scale and the corresponding signaling distance. This may sound strange to some engineers who have traditionally viewed connections as ideal, but the community of computational scientists and physicists researching how physical principles apply to computation has firmly established that relationships exist between distance and time metrics. 2

For example, Patrick Bosshart of Texas Instruments has defined a scalable metric that relates the wire time constant and signaling distance. The wire time constant, or resistance-capacitance (RC) time constant, is the overall propagation delay along a section of wire, which is approximately the wire section's lumped resistance times its lumped capacitance. Bosshart's metric is based on an individual gate delay but also relates to the clock cycle because it includes the number of gate delays per clock.

Bosshart derived his metric using a design rule of thumb typically applied at Texas Instruments: When gate and wire delays match, signal propagation speed is optimal. This rule implies that designers should insert a buffer gate when the RC time constant of a length of wire equals the intrinsic gate delay. Under these conditions, the distance from one buffer to the next--the signal drive distance--occurs in one gate delay's worth of time. This distance in turn defines a signal drive region, a square area in which one side equals the signal drive distance. This region is occupied by the number of gates a particular signal can directly reach in a single gate delay without using a buffer.

Assuming wire technology stays the same, for a fixed RC time constant, the thinner wires of advanced process technology must decrease in length. At the same time, gate delay will decrease (the transistors that form gates will become faster). Thus, the signal drive distance should decrease by a faster-than-linear rate because it is the product of these two factors. This means that the distance and number of gates directly reachable by a signal in a single gate delay is shrinking faster than the linear evolution of the CMOS process.

Scalability projections

The results from Bosshart's SPICE modeling support this. On a 0.6-um process with a typical gate delay of 250 ps, the equivalent RC time constant represents a 5-mm length of wire--almost a third the side of a 16-mm × 16-mm die.

You can extrapolate these metrics to future processes, making two reasonable assumptions:

To calculate the number of reachable gates, I assume this future die contains about 400 million gates (using the size forecast described later). The signal drive region would contain the number of gates equal to the total gates on a die times the ratio of the signal drive area to the total die area. For the more advanced, 0.06-um technology, this would be only 6,000 gates versus 100,000 for the 0.6-um process.

This exercise illustrates that the number of gates considered "local" to an unbuffered gate is shrinking, and more buffers will be needed just to implement a design. Architectures that cannot adapt to this constraint will become extinct. Even if wire technology improves--and I'm not saying it won't--the signal drive region would still shrink because transistor speeds are improving faster than the linear process evolution.

CLOCK SPEED TRENDS

Computers have historically improved performance by 2× every 18 months or so--the infamous Moore's law. During the 1980s, many performance gains came from integration because we could squeeze larger systems onto a single chip. But chip process improvements and integration alone can no longer improve performance at a rate consistent with Moore's law. Performance improvements must come from some resource, just as we extract a resource like oil. Once we've exhausted the gushers of single-chip integration, we must turn to more sophisticated techniques for extracting performance, such as fast clocks and complex architectures. It's the only way we'll stay on the performance curve that every competitor is targeting. This do-or-die attitude is ingrained in both the processor supplier and consumer cultures.

Clock speeds are improving at an accelerated rate because that's the next easiest way to tap the performance well. The thinking goes something like this: If we increase clock speed faster than improvements in gate speed, we can just reduce the gates per clock and add more pipeline stages. Unfortunately, the limit for aggressive frequency design is most likely reached around four to five "complex" gates per clock, or when basic adders are pipelined, 3 at which time the clock rate will improve no faster than gate speed or circuit improvements.

But let's be conservative for the sake of argument, and assume a constant 25 simple gate delays per clock cycle. The maximum clock frequency for the 0.6-um process would then be 166 MHz and, for the 0.06 um, 2.5 GHz.

Because time and distance are related, the number of gate delays per clock also dictates how far a signal can propagate before you must insert a synchronization register. Assuming roughly half the 25 gate delays are related to wire delays, the processor can traverse 12 signal drive distances in a clock period. Bosshart also developed this metric, which I call the clock locality metric. For processes above 0.18 um, the entire die can be reached in a clock cycle, but at 0.06 um, a signal can traverse only 1.5 mm (12 × 0.125 mm). To move a signal farther, the designer must add a pipeline register to resynchronize the signal to a local version of the clock. Long distance travel on a die requires inserting both buffers and registers.

Thus, as Figure 1 shows, the percentage of the die that can be reached within a few clock cycles is decreasing at an alarming rate; faster clocks would only accelerate this effect. For a 0.06-um process (lower right), for example, a signal can reach only five percent of the die's length in a clock cycle. Because the clock is also bounded by this restriction, the effective clock wavelength is much shorter than the die length.

Figure 1. Trends for the clock locality metric. Dashed line marks the generation (0.1 um) at which a billion transistor processor will first occur. At that point, only 16 percent of the die will be reachable within a single clock cycle.

This metric makes the wire scaling problem understandable in terms of the number of clocks required to access a remote part of the die. Essentially this distance segregates an integrated chip into little isolated islands of logic, and it is impossible to build superhighways to improve this delay. Therefore, commonly used architectural elements (like register files and crossbar switches) that increase size nonlinearly with complexity will not scale well on more advanced processes with slower wires and faster clocks.

REACHING A BILLION TRANSISTORS

So how do these metrics translate into design parameters for billion-transistor processors? Assuming a million gate capacity at 0.6 um, the 0.06-um process would contain 400 million gates (100 times more gates, four times bigger). If this die consisted entirely of four-transistor logic gates, it would represent the first billion transistor processor. Most likely, SRAM (with many more smaller transistors) for on-chip caches will occupy over half the die area. This means that the first billion transistor processor is likely to appear in a 0.1-um process, as the dashed vertical line in Figure 1 indicates.

The figure also shows that in the 0.1-um process, only 16 percent of the die length is reachable within one clock period (at 1.2 GHz). Each clock region contains two million gates, so eight synchronizing pipeline registers are needed for the signal to propagate across the entire die length. The signal drive distance that an unbuffered gate can directly reach would be 0.36 mm, which will constrain the design into small regions of approximately 13,000 gates.

CONCLUSION

Shrinking signal drive distance and clock locality metric indicate that an ever-increasing grain size for complex architectures 4 cannot continue. Large architectures with good locality and corresponding floor planning will survive; other large architectures will give way to finer grained architectures 5 that scale well with poor wires. The individual smaller regions of logic or memory in future large designs will be distributed over the die, making a locality metric between these regions more important. Architectures that require long-distance, rapid interaction will not scale well, since propagation latency would be measured in tens of clocks cycles. Fast clocks with wavelengths much shorter than the die size will compound clock skew and synchronization problems.

References


1. M. Bohr, "Interconnect Scaling--The Real Limiter to High Performance ULSI," Proc. Int'l Electron Devices Meeting, IEEE Press, New York, 1995, pp. 241-244.
2. D. Hillis, "New Computer Architectures and Their Relationship to Physics or Why Computer Science is No Good," Int'l J. Theoretical Physics, Vol. 21, Nos. 3, 4, 1982, pp. 255-262.
3. C. Lemonds, "A 500 MHz, One Volt, 16 by 16 Multiplier for DSP Cores," Proc. VLSI Signal Processing Workshop, IEEE Press, New York, 1996, pp. 481-484.
4. F. Preparata, "Horizons of Parallel Computation," Tech. Report CS-93-20, Brown University, Providence, R.I.
5. W. Dally, "A Universal Parallel Computer Architecture," New Generation Computing, Vol. 11, 1993, pp. 227-249.

Doug Matzke is a senior member of the technical staff in the Digital Signal Processing group at Texas Instruments. His research interests include the limits of computing, fast cycle-based simulators, and design tools.

Matzke received a BSEE from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MSEE from the University of Texas. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM. Contact him at;